Author’s Note: I live in music and to me that’s the most important. I am not a gearhead or an audiophile. I just love music and I want it to sound great, as if it was performed live. Sound quality is important to me, but some of the best times I ever had was driving with friends as a teen and listening to rock, blues and soul music on a cheap car radio with tiny speakers, often with a torn membrane. Like most baby boomers, I played vinyl records for years, although as a teen I did not have the money for more than a plastic $45 Montgomery Ward record player with crappy built in speakers. That was during an impressionable period of musical discovery and it sounded like gold to me. For this article about the longstanding debate of vinyl vs. CD, I can’t give you all the scientific audio-data to explain the audiophile math and physics. It’s all out there for you to read. This is just my personal viewpoint, unscientific and nothing more than my opinion.
by Frank Matheis
I got into a debate with a bloviating vinyl guy. I am lucky that he did not hit me, he was so fanatically angry.
We’re not talking about Certificates of Deposit but music Compact Discs. There is no financial gain. The only thing you get in return for the investment in a music library is a lifetime of musical listening pleasure, often ecstatic joy and sheer happiness. To me, it’s about the music and not the medium. If I can’t get hi-fi, I’ll take low-fi. I play CDs and never thought much about it until I had an encounter with a stalwart, fervent believer in vinyl.
Vinyl vs. CD is a debate I never wanted to have. “Each his own” was always my motto. I don’t care what others like or dislike. Listening is a very personal experience. If you prefer records, play vinyl. If it sounds good to you, that’s good enough.
I recently interviewed a singer/songwriter who declared that “nobody buys CDs anymore.” The vinyl resurgence is real. In 2022, record sales outperformed CDs in the US for the first time since 1987. Just over 41 million vinyl records were sold in 2022, to the tune of $1.2bn Only 33 million CDs were sold, amounting to $483m. That’s a big deal, but 33 million CDs sold does not quite equate to “nobody” buying them. The world has moved to streaming and digital downloads.
Anyway, here is what happened:
I was in a small local store that sold variety merchandize, including vinyl records. I asked the proprietor if he had any CDs. He grimaced a face of utter condescending disgust at me, barking, “I don’t sell CDs!!! They are of inferior sound quality. The output of an analog record player is without conversion. No sampling like CDs. The waveforms from a vinyl recording are much more accurate, whereas CDs are compressed digital. Vinyl is warm.”
He apparently did not know that many LPs today are pressed from digital masters. That kind of kills the debate point.
Ironically, we were arguing over comparing vinyl records and CDs, both of which can make the music sound as good as if we heard it live, if played on a really good sound system. That’s not the sound-quality problem of today, when people seemingly accept the inferior sound emanated from streaming or downloading MP3s on phones and tinny little computer speakers. To this guy, however, CDs apparently were the devil’s spawn.
I handed him my business card and invited him over for a blind listening experience. He furiously threw it across the counter to the floor like a paper airplane. Reasoning with him was like trying to change someone’s mind at a Trump rally.
My last effort was to plead, “But the human ear cannot detect a difference”, because all media encompass the range of normal hearing is 20 Hz – 20 KHz. The sampling rate for CDs is sufficient to fully capture sound in this range. You can measure the difference with an oscilloscope but otherwise nobody would ever know that CDs are sampled by approximating the path of the original sound wave by taking snapshots of it at different intervals, at the standardized rate of 44.1 kHz, or 44,100 samples per second. CDs are limited in sampling to 16-bits and 44.1kHz, which equates to exactly 96dB of signal to noise and 22.05kHz of audio bandwidth. There is just one thing: The human ear can’t tell. LPs can contain signals of higher frequency as high as 35KHz. Most adult humans cannot hear nearly as high as 20KHz, and the older we get the less we hear. Instruments can measure sound scientifically, but you can’t actually hear the difference. Audiophiles have hypothesized that some sort of metaphysical “supersonics” can be “sensed” but none of these ideas have been actually proven in blind studies.
Yet, the myth persists. Audiophiles and gear heads read about the scientific readings in hi-fi magazines, and the reinforced bias is perpetuated, like so much disinformation today. The fact is that people have been told that vinyl is superior, and they believe it, sometimes fanatically. It’s faith more than fact. They regurgitate popular sentiments because they have been told so by pundits who often have a financial interest in promoting their ideas. A lot of claims about records seem to have become accepted as fact, even when there is little evidence to support them.
In fact, it’s all relative. Sound quality of vinyl vs. CD depends on how the album is mastered or recorded and the apparatus which you are listening to. There are so many variables and contributing factors that influence sound quality.
When CDs came along in the late 1980s, I embraced them enthusiastically. No matter how good I took care of my records, I was tired of the pops, crackles and hiss, the scratches and static cling dust. Having to turn the record over every six songs was inconvenient. A few of my favorite records were actually worn down and had to be replaced. Not only that, but the quality of vinyl is not what it was in the 1960s and ‘70s. When they first came out with CDs, people warned that we had no idea whether they would last. They might disintegrate in 20 years, they proclaimed. So here we are, more than 30 years later. None of my CDs have decomposed.
People claim that vinyl plays “warmer.” Yet, if a high-quality CD player is connected to a very good amplifier, including tube-amps, the sound is equally warm. The difference comes down to mastering and personal preference. The fact is that CD has higher bandwidth, lower noise floor, complete channel separation/less crosstalk, no wow/flutter, no dust buildup, no degrading over multiple uses, no inner-groove distortion. I like the clean sound, but I also want it warm and true-to-the master recording. (I do really miss the LP album covers with readable liner notes.)
The sound equipment is the major determinant. Yes, a $10,000 set up with a record player will sound better than a $500 CD set-up, and vice versa. If you choose the right components, you can get great sound from both vinyl and CD. Nowadays, I have two superb sound systems. The term “superb” in itself is relative. You can spend $30,000 on a receiver alone. True audiophiles may spend more than the price of a car on a stereo system. Not me. I am happy with my modest but great sounding set-ups, which are the best I’ve ever owned. In the living room I enjoy a great sounding set-up: a 6-CD Onkyo changer connected to a high-end Yamaha amplifier, a pair of Boston speaker towers and a Klipsch sub-woofer. I can listen for hours-on-end while writing, without having to get up to tend to the stereo. My best system is in the bedroom, where I run a high-end Marantz single CD player connected to a hybrid tube/solid state amplifier by Heaven 11 from Montreal , Canada, played through two amazing Klipsch speakers. My sound system plays CDs as “warm” and just as close to analog as it gets. The Heaven 11 “Billie” tube/solid state hybrid amp makes it all happen. Any good tube amp or hybrid will give you that desired sound. The job of the sound system is to replicate the original master sound, to make it be as if it was played live. It just does not get better than this.
I’ve been fortunate to hear all types of music in some of the best concert halls and music clubs in the world. Carnegie Hall is the gold standard, but I’ve been in wonderful small listening rooms, intimate venues, up close to the performers and it sounded excellent. That’s the sound I want replicated at home and that’s what I got, whether I play Americana or Zydeco, Blues, Jazz or Classical.
If people prefer vinyl, that’s Ok by me. Let them pay $25 + for 12 songs, when I pay half that for up to 20 songs. The future is not in either vinyl or CD, it will be in super high-resolution downloads. New audio technology is reaching for the stars, but still, the human ear is limited. As an old baby-boomer, I will live happily into old age with my vast CD collection.
In the end, it’s about the music and I’ll take it any way I can get it.